My review of Aaron Hughes, The Study of Judaism, has recently been posted. You can access it here.
Jewish Time in Early Nineteenth Century America
A new article of mine just appeared in the American Jewish Archives Journal.
Abstract:
Jewish Time in Early-Nineteenth-Century America: 1–29
In 1806, a clerk in Newport, Rhode Island, by the name of Moses Lopez published the first free-standing Jewish calendar in the Americas. In this article, Satlow investigates both the historical context in which this calendar was produced and how American Jews used it in the nineteenth century. Through the lens of Lopez’s calendar and its use, we can thus catch a glimpse of how the American Jewish community used material objects to form and reinforce its self-identity.
Passover and the Festival of Matzot
I have a new essay, “Passover and the Festival of Matzot: Synthesizing Two Holidays,” over at thetorah.com. Check it out here!
Book Launch
Although the official launch date for my book, How the Bible Became Holy, is not until April 15, I see that it is now shipping (and available on Kindle) from Amazon.
And I hope that you like the new spiffy design on this website, thanks to Ariana Parenti and the crack online marketing team at Yale University Press! I’ll be making some additions and modification over the next couple of months. I may also have a new idea or two one of these days.
The Most Popular Kind of Judaism
The other day I found myself with an awkward amount of free time between serious commitments — the kind of pocket of time that is too long to really justify playing with Facebook but too short to get engaged in any project that required concentration. So I decided to whittle away the time on Google’s Ngram viewer, which by now you might have noticed is an endless source of amusement to me.
I have nothing very profound to say about the experiment above. I searched the terms “Reform Judaism,” “Orthodox Judaism,” “Conservative Judaism,” and “Hasidism” in the entire English language corpus of Google Books from the end of the nineteenth century to 2008. This should give us some measure of the general interest that the reading population has in these movements (at least under these names). Three things immediately grabbed my attention:
- Starting in the 1950s, interest in Hasidism far outstrips interest in the other movements. Is this due to exoticism?
- Over the past decade or so there has been a decline of interest in all forms of Judaism (correlated to the decline in enrollments in Jewish Studies in colleges throughout the country?).
- The crossing of the “Orthodox Judaism” and “Conservative Judaism” lines. Although both are pretty low, perhaps this corroborates the narrative of the decline of the latter.
Just some thoughts to play with during your own awkward pocket of time today.